How To Build Emotional Intelligence
Dr. Sunayana Nature Baruah or Su as she calls herself is a licensed Clinical & Counselling Psychologist working in France. She graduated from the Professional Doctorate programmed in Counselling Psychology of Trinity College Dublin, Ireland.
Emotional Intelligence (EI) also known as Emotional Quotient (EQ) just like IQ (Intelligence Quotient) is an important life skill that we can build on and practice for ourselves to experience better mental health, and healthy relationships and live better, more integrated lives.
Emotional Intelligence is the ability to understand one’s and other’s emotions at all times and respond appropriately to support yourself and others around you. This skill is important in promoting both personal and professional well-being.
The important elements of emotional intelligence are
Self-awareness
Emotional regulation of yourself
Empathy towards yourself and others
Being able to maintain healthy, long-term relationships
Quick tips to help you start building this important life skill
1. Building self-awareness
Becoming more aware of your own emotions by beginning to name your emotions is an important step in building emotional intelligence. Identifying and labelling what it is that you are feeling at any given time, be it you feeling excited, isolated or you are anticipating a positive event, naming your emotions goes a long way in helping you become more emotionally aware of yourself. A lot of people find journalling their emotions very helpful but also professional therapy might be a valuable space to engage with your emotional world and get to know yourself in a deep, reflective manner.
2. Being aware of others’ emotions and how they feel
Emotional Intelligence as a skill begins with reflecting on your own emotions but then it extends to gauging how others feel about your behaviour and how they may respond to your actions. Adjusting your communication and expression of your emotions based on how you might be perceived or how your message might be experienced is an important part of being emotionally intelligent.
3. Learning how to listen actively
Asking genuine questions, repeating people’s answers back to them to make sure that you heard them right, keeping mental and verbal judgments at bay, and trying to not find solutions when someone discloses their issues to you are all ways of learning how to listen actively. All of these are ways to make the other person feel respected but also for you to build your focus and attention on what they might be going through in life.
4. Effective communication
First knowing what your needs are is the initial step in being able to communicate them effectively to another person. Effective communication skills are an integral part of being emotionally intelligent. This step is crucial for building stronger relationships.
5. Cultivating optimism
Building emotional intelligence is directly linked to your positive state of mind in which you believe in yourself and others’ capacity to show up for you in the ways that you need them to. A kind gesture, a word of appreciation, and belief in your capacity to do a good job and meet expectations all go a long way in becoming emotionally intelligent. Our difficult and not-so-positive emotions are also all very real but we need to regulate and manage our expression of these emotions according to our own needs as well as others’ expectations of us.
6. Openness to experiences
Embracing other viewpoints, and perspectives and adopting a genuine interest in understanding another person’s experiences as well as their view of the world play an important role in making us emotionally intelligent.
7. Empathise with yourself and others
seeing your past, your actions, and the decisions that you take through a lens of neutrality, deep understanding, and/or even compassion and then extending the same lens towards others' actions,emotions, and lived experiences. Trying to imagine yourself in other people’s shoes always helps to understand where they are coming from.
8. Building accountability for self
knowing what you could have done differently without being self-critical, being open to repairing ruptures in relationships and changing that dynamic for the better for you and for the other person are all ways of becoming more emotionally intelligent. Remorse and change should follow repair if/when a rupture in dynamics happens.
9. Regulate your emotions
Do you remember the sense of ease that you feel on a calm, restful day of no errands, no demands, and no deadlines? Hold on to this emotional state and use it as your mental health baseline. Every time you feel stressed and you feel like you have been pushed far away from it, bring yourself back to it mentally through applying different strategies such as meditation, journaling, a self-care routine or engaging in professional therapy.
Dr. Sunayana Nature Baruah, Clinical & Counselling Psychologist
Dr. Sunayana Nature Baruah or Su as she calls herself is a licensed Clinical & Counselling Psychologist working in France. She graduated from the Professional Doctorate programme in Counselling Psychology of Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. She is a Chartered Psychologist with the Psychological Society of Ireland (PSI) and a member of the International Psychoanalytical Association(IPA). She has worked with adults of all age groups in hospitals, primary care clinics and private practices across India, Ireland and now in France. She has extensively worked with people who had experienced trauma in their lives as well as eating disorders and body image issues. Her motto: Mental health is health.
